OSDisc.com Has Closed

August 4, 2019

Hi Everyone,
After over 16 years, OSDisc.com has closed. I started OSDisc to spread Linux and help new users get started. But providing DVDs today has little effect on the spread of Linux. I regularly see small distros that provide
tens of thousands of downloads, but few if any DVDs are provided by OSDisc. The vast majority of Linux users are downloading Linux themselves. And that's a great thing to see.
What we've accomplished:

Shipped over 300,000 discs and USB drives

Helped over 110,000 users get started with Linux

Answered over 25,000 tech support tickets

Given back over $200,000 to the open source community

Thank you to everyone for making OSDisc possible for the past 16 years.
Sincerely,
Ramsey Brenner
OSDisc.com Founder

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Linux Mint's purpose is to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop based on Ubuntu. Some of the reasons for the success of Linux Mint are:

It's one of the most community driven distributions

It is a Debian-based distribution and as such it is very solid and it comes with one of the greatest package managers

It is compatible with and uses Ubuntu repositories. This gives Linux Mint users access to a huge collection of packages and software.

It comes with a lot of desktop improvements which make it easier for the user to do common things

There is a strong focus on making things work out of the box (WiFi cards drivers in the file system, multimedia support, screen resolution, etc)

New features in Linux Mint 19.1 Xfce

Linux Mint 19.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2023. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable.

Linux Mint 19.1 "Tara" Xfce Edition

Update Manager

The Update Manager is able to list mainline kernels and to show their support status:

Listing available kernels

A new button was added to make it easier to remove unused kernels:

Removing unused kernels

Software Sources

The Software Sources tool was given a new look. Similar to the welcome screen, it’s now using an Xapp sidebar and a headerbar.

Software Sources

When software crashes tools such as mintreport produce a stack trace our developers can look at to understand the cause of the crash. This is the first step towards fixing such a bug. For the stack trace to be meaningful, users need to have debug symbols installed. In an effort to reduce bandwidth for their mirrors, Debian decided to move debug symbols outside of the main repositories. This decision affected not only Debian and LMDE but also Ubuntu and Linux Mint and made it much more difficult for users to install these symbols. To simplify this process, support for debug symbols was added into the Software Sources tool. Adding debug symbol repositories can now be done with a click of the mouse.

A new button was also added within the “Maintenance” tab to remove duplicate entries in your repositories.

Input Methods

The Language Settings and the Input Methods are now two separate applications.

The user interface for the Input Methods tool was revamped. It uses an icon sidebar and now shows a dedicated page for each supported language.

Input Methods

Clear instructions are provided for each language to guide you through not only installing support packages but also selecting the right input method framework and the right input method.

Cinnamon 4.0 also received better Fcitx support. Its keyboard applet now hides when Fcitx is running.

XApps improvements

Xreader

Improvements were made to the look and feel of the document viewer. Thumbnails and page borders in particular look more crisp:

Xreader

Xed

Xed, the text editor, moved to libpeas, python3 and the MESON build system.

Xed

Its statusbar was reworked. It now indicates whether the document is in tabs or spaces mode and highlight modes are searchable.

LibXApp

Four new widgets are available in libxapp:

XAppStackSidebar makes it easy to create icon sidebars, such as the ones used in the Welcome Screen or the Software Sources.

XAppPreferencesWindow provides a multi-page preference window with a built-in icon sidebar. This component is used to display application preferences in Xed, Xreader and Nemo.

An XAppPreferencesWindow in Xed

XAppIconChooserDialog provides a dialog which lets you choose an icon name or an icon path.

XAppIconChooserButton provides a button which shows an icon or an image, and lets you choose a new one when clicked.

An XAppIconChooserButton and its XAppIconChooserDialog

Other improvements

Firewall configuration was added to the "First Steps" section of the welcome screen.

To prevent you from typing your password into the wrong window (and sending it online by mistake), sudo now shows asterisks when you type your password.

This release ships with linux-firmware 1.173.2 and the Linux kernel 4.15.0-20.